Category Archives: Psychology

This is a little quiz prompted by a recent conversation with Matt F who brought these little metrics to my attention. Below is a chart of the Dow and on it I have plotted a simple 3 ATR stop which can serve as a trend indicator. The question is – given the information above would…

I came across this excellent chart the other day. It shows those times in history when the S&P 500 doubled over a ten year period and the trajectory that this doubling took. Source – @morganhousel Much commentary that followed on twitter related to the steady low volatility climb that characterised the latest run and how boring…

“Be more confident,” a friend once told me as we made the rounds at a swanky networking event where I felt terribly out of place. Faking confidence is easy: I pulled my shoulders back and spoke louder and with more assertiveness. Like many soft-spoken, mild-mannered people, I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to…

Resilience, defined as the psychological capacity to adapt to stressful circumstances and to bounce back from adverse events, is a highly sought-after personality trait in the modern workplace. As Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant argue in their recent book, we can think of resilience as a sort of muscle that contracts during good times and expands during bad…

Before I simply bellow FUCK YES in an infantile manner and sign off it is worth having a look at what the literature says about the impact of wealth not only on your psychological wellbeing but also upon your general health, life outcomes and overall demeanour. Two papers I recently read looked at this topic…

Sit down and think, for a moment, about what your successful friends do compared to your loser friends that complain. If you don’t have any successful friends, then you need these tips I’m about to share more than anyone. Your successful friends think differently, speak differently, and work 10 times harder than your loser friends.…

Benoit Mandelbrot was a Polish-born, French and American “mathematician with broad interests in the practical sciences.” I met him only once at a lecture at Microsoft Research before he passed away in 2010. Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson are the authors of the influential book The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence. I suggest you…

The ability to focus is an important driver of excellence. Focused techniques such as to-do lists, timetables, and calendar reminders all help people to stay on task. Few would argue with that, and even if they did, there is evidence to support the idea that resisting distraction and staying present have benefits: practicing mindfulness for 10 minutes a day, for example, can enhance leadership effectiveness by…

Do investors holding an asset in the midst of a price bubble all come to share similar beliefs, even if they did not do so previously? Asset price bubbles are unfailingly supported by a captivating narrative, which is ‘validated’ by price movements, draws in investors and allows for traditional valuation considerations to be discarded. It…

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